I have used Irssi and GNU Screen together for what seems to have been
well over a decade now. Both applications do the job required of them
quite well and as such they have always been one of the first things I
installed an a fresh system.

Unfortunately, neither of the projects has had an official release in
the past few years. This obviously isn't that big a deal of course since
the Git versions of both are readily available to anyone who chooses to
use them. I personally have used the Git version of GNU Screen for some
time now.

A week ago I decided that I wanted to expand my horizons a bit and
branch out to other software to see how they compared against both
applications. Since WeeChat and tmux have been rapidly growing in
popularity they were the obvious choice for this impromptu test.

My goal was to run them both for an entire week after configuring them
to my liking and see how things went. I will admit that I honestly fully
expected to switch back to Irssi and GNU Screen after things were all
said and done.

As the title of this post has already alluded to, that didn't exactly
happen as I quickly discovered that I really liked both WeeChat and
tmux.

While both applications do exactly the same thing as their respective
counterparts, they each had a lot little things that won me over. For
instance, tux's status line is much easier to configure and I like the
split pane implementation better than the one the Git version of GNU
Screen provides. The mouse support for it is a nice bonus as well.

WeeChat has various features like SASL, Colorized Nick Names, and a Nick
list built-in that could only be incorporated into Irssi through the
usage of a third-party script.

Although the respective scripts for Irssi work quite well on their own
and are admittedly mostly cosmetic in nature, I was nevertheless pleased
to see them built into WeeChat's core.

Having SASL built into the client was somewhat important in my decision
to stay with WeeChat. I use it for every server that I connect to and
I've long felt that Irssi should have it built into its core as well.

I also liked WeeChat's smart filtering, gestures implementation, and the
aspell plugin it comes with.

In conclusion, all the applications are absolutely fantastic in their
own right and all of them have their own pros and cons to using them.

It all boils down to personal preference in the end. In my case, both
WeeChat and tmux offered me things that their counterpart either lacked
or did not implement as well.

That's not to say that they not lacking in areas as well. One example
would be that WeeChat does not have proper theme support. I must admit
that I wouldn't use it much, but it would be nice to have just the same.

Even if you have no interest in ever switching from your preferred
terminal multiplexer or IRC client of choice, I hope this article makes
you consider giving their alternatives a try at least once.